Joining an international community of monthly tech meetups, Techno-activism Third Monday (TA3M) is the product of a conversation with Lighthouse Studio resident Chris Pinchen, who decided to bring the practical skills, discussions, and community surrounding this established event to Lighthouse. This meetup aims to consider current concerns of surveillance and censorship, and is open to all levels of expertise and technical knowledge. TA3M aims to bring a larger community together, to learn in a supportive and informative environment.

Aimed at forging networks and creating communities, the meetups bring together a diversity of people interested in surveillance, censorship and open technology to explore common goals, ways of working together and skill and knowledge sharing.

The inaugural Brighton Techno-Activism 3rd Monday will bring together local people to present, and discuss, projects they are involved with through short talks. Tickets are free, but booking is advised as places are limited, to register your interest book here.

Talks from:

The Open Rights Group will talk about Privacy Not Prism, explaining why and how Big Brother Watch, Open Rights Group, English PEN and German internet campaigner Constanze Kurz are challenging the UK’s surveillance activities before the European Court of Human Rights.

Tactical Tech will show their guide to Visualising Information for Advocacy and give an overview of some of their other toolkits such as Security in a Box.

I’ve started my short residency here at the Lighthouse Studio and the first two weeks have flown by in a whirl of crypto/surveillence discussions and lashings of the builders tea which Lighthouse appears to run on.

Mostly I’ve been preparing two events, Tech Activism 3rd Monday on November 18th and Brighton CryptoFestival on December 1st, both of which are collaborations with Lighthouse and Open Rights Group and will be hosted by Lighthouse. #TA3M “are monthly meetups that happen simultaneously in cities throughout the world. It brings together a diversity of people interested in surveillance, censorship and open technology”, and the aim is to find people in and around Brighton who are either working on or interested in, well, tech and activism, and explore ways to work together.

When I first moved to Brighton I was surprised to find that there hadn’t been a CryptoParty here so I started nosing around and discovered that various discussions were taking place which have finally come to fruition in Brighton CryptoFestival, inspired by the London CryptoFestival which takes place the day before. It will be a will be a mixture of talks, workshops, cryptoparty and kids activities, intended for everyone; no prior technical expertise or knowledge is assumed.

My fellow resident Mark brought along some of his Emotional Infrastucture diaries and I’ve been keeping one on surveillance which I’ll be posting more about – it’s been a great way to focus on the topic and you can download your own over at his site.

So next week I’ll be doing more preparation for the events and also putting together a privacy session for the folks at Lighthouse – and somewhere along the way Catalan food got thrown into the mix too, so next week will see the first Practical Privacy & Catalan Cuisine Workshop ever.